10/15/2007 @ 6:00PM

Abstract

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a posthuman stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”

Philosophical Quarterly (2003), Vol. 53, No. 211, pp. 243-255

August 14, 2027. Tuesday.

We all hated Travis. We hated the way he constantly discussed what his clothing would have cost somebody who didn’t have a perpetually post-college slump sister who worked a seemingly endless chain of men’s retail jobs. We hated his diamond-shaped designer glasses. We hated the way he injected nearly nonsensical sentences into conversation in an effort to establish a catch phrase.

And we especially hated the fact that here, at a managers meeting in the Horse You Rode In On Coffee Shop, across the street from the office plaza where we worked, Travis was going to save all our jobs.

“Ask Travis,” he said as he fished the mini-drive out of the inside pocket of his dark red sports coat. “And ye shall receive.”

“What is it?” asked Bets. Bets wasn’t one of Travis’ friends. A bitter woman built like a sack of randomly jumbled quadrilaterals, when Bets looked at Travis, with tiny black eyes that seemed suspended in her almost comically thick glass lenses, we all thought we saw genuine hatred. We all knew Travis only invited her to prove that, despite Bets’ clear disgust, he was bigger than that, bigger than her.

“It’s Stint.”

“OK,” said Charles. Accounting. Token black guy. Nobody knew anything about him. We thought that he might be married. He might, if we’d heard rightly at the ’25 Christmas party, have been from South Carolina. His cube, aggressively free of personal artifacts, was a clear indication that he didn’t want us to know anything about him. We respected his wishes. “Why do we give a damn about Stint?”

“This is going to save our company. Welcome to the 21st century.”

We had started to lose interest. There was already a widely held belief that whatever Travis had cooked up to save our firm from its financial death spiral was bull. He was, most of us believed, a smooth talker whose verbal prowess was the only thing that covered the fact that he was profoundly incompetent.

Besides, the current financial slump, the reason we were worried about the future of the firm, was global in scope. It started as a temporary downturn and just kept downturning. Every night, for months, the television showed Euro-angular German stockbrokers, post-frat looking American traders, frantically disheveled Asian commodities brokers all looking up at tickers the home audience couldn’t see, staring blankly upward as if they were waiting for Superman to save them.

The press flirted with phrases like “slow down,” excited to be able to add a little spice to the economic numbers they flashed up every night. The flirtation turned in a morbid fascination by the time their legal departments had cleared “recession” for prime time. Finally, legal agreed to such extreme and banner-headline-friendly terms as “depression” and “meltdown,” which would have sold papers, if people had money to buy papers.

Sensing the turn in his audience’s mood, Travis’ voice gained an edge of desperation. “Stint is an engine for hyper-complex simulations.”

“A market forecaster?” one of us asked.

“I’ll forecast the market for you right now,” another added. “Grim. With slight chance of total collapse. We don’t need a program for that.”

“Mostly, it’s a historical research tool,” said Travis, lowering his voice as if to slip this data into the conversation stream without any of us fully processing it.

We were all quiet for a second. Nearly half of us were trying to figure out what this apparent non-sequitur had to do with our failing firm. The other half we waiting for the generalized mockery of Travis to begin and were desperately trying to think up something clever.

“Explain,” said Charles. His tone was matter of fact. The shock of the realization that Charles was taking this seriously was enough to make the rest of us begin to toy with the idea that this informal meeting might, in fact, turn out to be something worthwhile. Crucial, even. Charles, despite his friendship-adverse nature, was well-respected for his universally appreciated ability to navigate through storms. He was the wage-slave version of those dudes who vanish into the wood with only a knife.

Two years later they’re found living off tree bark, wearing animal skins and making nutritional smoothies out of locally gathered herbs and their own urine. He was self-sufficient, a survivor. Recognizing this, the cube drones had adopted a simple crisis policy, all the more inflexible for its being unofficial: When in trouble, do whatever Charles does. If Charles was taking Travis’ crap seriously, it was, immediately, upgraded to status of essential knowledge.

Travis, understanding the historically unprecedented centrality he’d suddenly been granted, rose to the occasion with strained seriousness. “Confession time. I’ve been working a sideline, sort of.”

This was no surprise. Nearly all of us had been at one point. Even before the crunch, freelance bucks were how one afforded anything other than the essentials. One of the most brutal things about the current global depression was the expansion of the primary gig, swallowing the time to perform your secondary and drying up that supplementary income.

“A handful of comp sci and history guys at the uni have been running academic simulations for nearly three years now. They’re cranking out important, prize-winning stuff; but with the crunch, writing notable papers isn’t keeping the mad science labs in Jacob’s ladders, right? They reached out to some friends in business and are looking to productize their methods. The result: virtual workplaces. Stint can create a simulated workplace full of simulated workers.”

“And you run management models or something?”

“You’re not thinking big enough. This is a hyper-complex simulation. For blue-collar stuff, that’s all you could do. You can simulate the steel mill or production line, but ultimately the results are purely informational. Even if you hook the whole thing up to rapid prototypers, you are getting fake cars or whatever. But what’s the difference between a simulated creative work and a real one?”

Nobody answered.

“If you could simulate somebody doing market research, right? They were a hyper-complex simulation, serious AI, full-on HAL action, OK? So you put this simulated worker on to market research. And you let him have full access to the data that a real worker would have. And, because it is a hyper-complex simulation, this simulated worker talks to his simulated coworkers and his simulated wife and his simulated mistress and whatever provides inspiration for a solid market analysis. Then he produces the analysis. What’s the difference between his analysis and the analysis of a non-simulated worker?”

Bets spoke up, “It will be too abstract. How complex can these things be?”

“How complex does it need to be?” Travis said. “How many factors are truly taken into account when producing creatives or research or whatever? For an average person to handle this, we’ve got to abstract it all anyway. Besides, Stint regularly runs simulations of Jamestown Colony. I’ve seen it. It may be a little buggy, but it works. It can predict where the empty powder sacks landed when Maximilian’s executioners threw them away after loading their muskets. It can handle cloning a contemporary office.”

“Why offices?” asked Charles.

“You mean, why not find the lost treasure of the Sierra Madre or whatever. You could. Stint could help you find lost ships full of pirate gold, but you’d still have to launch the expedition. The tools themselves are marketable. Why risk being a prospector when you can make a killing selling shovels? Here’s what I propose: We create a virtual office using data based on us … “

“Then we bid insanely low on work,” said Charles.

“Right. The virtual workers don’t get paid, don’t eat up insurance, and, push comes to shove, we get too much work or them to handle, we just keep cloning the office.”

Ari, from IT, thin guy with a Jew-fro of dark curls and a T-shirt that read “Raised By Polite Wolves,” jumped in: “How are we going to run this program? These hyper-complex simulations you’re talking about eat up server space on a scale exponentially beyond what we’re using now.”

“Stint will actually run the program. If we’re willing to guinea pig the project, they’ll do the heavy lifting, computer-wise.”

We all pondered the proposal for a moment.

Of course, Charles was the first to speak. “I say we meet with the Stint people.”

How many minutes a day do you unproductively surf the Internet? The face of success in this company looks like me; agree or disagree?

We handled the first month well. The info requested was strictly business stuff and it was not particularly pleasant, but it was no worse than going through a process audit or any of a million other consulting trials.

My manager respects my contributions to the ongoing development of a winning team; agree or disagree? Do you e-mail when you know a face-to-face conversation is in order as a way of avoiding conflict?

By the second month, the questions had gotten weirdly personal. We were asked about various unpleasant habits, interrogated about our personal lives and shrinks were called in to help the Stint folks correctly model the dark underbellies of our psyches. Franklin, a fairly unassuming cube drone in professional development, broke under the scrutiny. Water cooler scuttlebutt said it had something to do with either past repressed childhood trauma or current unrepressed child porn addiction.

I hear racist or sexist jokes … constantly, often, frequently, occasionally, rarely, never. Rank the following administrative tasks in order of importance.

Still, we plodded on. Questionnaires were answered. Tests were taken.

How many times a day do you take bathroom breaks? Do you secretly resent your co-workers who can work from home?

Nearly three months after Travis’ initial proposal, we went live.

***

The initial launch was actually a bit anti-climactic. As silly as it now seems in retrospect, many of had this notion that we would be able to watch the virtual office grind away. Like a little ant farm, we’d have some God’s eye view of the comings and goings of our tiny little un-selves. Instead, the existence of this virtual world was revealed solely through emails and IM chains, data dumps and compressed files mailed to “clients.”

Trying to keep track of it all was impossible. It would have been like trying to read all the random bits of data generated by the entire real-world staff on any given day. After the initial shine wore off, many of us contented ourselves with just keeping tabs on our virtual mirrors. And, honestly, after a few weeks, even that got old and most of us dropped it.

Bets was the only one who, somehow, managed to keep tabs on the whole simulated office. Slowly, as the rest of us gave up, she became a sort of go-between betwixt us and our unreal personas. She’d gossip about the doings in the virtual office, taking special care to note whenever our simulated selves had done something surprising atypical of their real world counterparts. This would have quickly become tiresome, but a whole virtual affair between co-workers who were, to our knowledge, never romantically involved, jazzed up Bets’ dishing and it became office tradition to spend a few minutes in the lunch room checking in with Bets.

***

Despite any feelings of disappointment regarding the interface, the first week of the virtual office being online was almost festive. Despite what we assumed were bugs plaguing the interface between us and our and cloned, simulated selves, the morale was reaching “giddy” and “exuberant” levels. Our workloads were shifted to our doppelgangers and, suddenly, we were all managers.

The bugs, however, eventually became a nuisance. For example, meetings our virtual selves called would show up in our calendars. There were several non-starter meetings through the firm before we figured out just what was going on. While we were trying to lock that down, we started receiving emails from our simulated clones. Not intentional e-mails, of course. What would happen is that an e-mail sent by virtual Jack to virtual Jane would end up in actual Jane’s in-box as well. This proved to be an especially sensitive issue as our virtual selves developed radically different personal relationships than we had and it was not uncommon for strange, overly personal, sometimes offensive, often simply bizarre emails to arrive in our in-boxes.

***

Nearly a year past the launch, with positive results beginning to show even while a irritating swarm of bugs plagued the system, we lost several days. Basically, we all arrived one morning to find the entire computer system “reset” to its exact status six days ago. We had hardcopy e-mails and printouts from the intervening time, but the back-ups were virginally blank of the last business week and a day. As far as anybody could tell, we didn’t lose data. The data were never there. Bets pointed out that, strangely, the virtual office hadn’t lost anything.

IT, of course, took the fall, and they frantically tried to recover the last week and some change’s worth of work. Right before close of day, the day was miraculously there again. We couldn’t explain. You won’t be able to explain it either, believe me. It was just there. Only it was different. Decisions we hadn’t made were, in our returned e-mails and suddenly accessible databases, played out as if, for the last several days, we’d gone down that other, historically inert route.

Troy suggested that we’d fallen into a parallel dimension. He was soundly mocked.

It was during this time–some time between the sudden appearance of our semi-work and the collective joshification of Troy–that Charles called Travis into a meeting room on eight. We weren’t there, but we reconstructed the meeting.

The following is a dramatization.

Charles: “We need to call in the Stint guys. Something’s very wrong.”

Travis: “It may be a little buggy, but it works.”

Charles: “It isn’t some bug I’m thinking about. Look, when we were doing the personal data for the simulation, I lied. I added hobbies I didn’t have. Specifically, I discussed at great length my completely imaginary kayaking addiction. But the other day, I found a life vest in my garage.”

Travis: “You’re not thinking big enough. This is a hyper-complex simulation.”

Charles: “Not thinking … Are you even listening? There’s something seriously screwed up with Stint and we’re getting some sort of data bleed, but on this impossible … “

Travis: “Ask Travis, and ye shall receive.”

Charles: “Travis? What are you … “

Travis: “They’re cranking out important, prize-winning stuff; but with the crunch, writing notable papers isn’t keeping the mad science labs in Jacob’s ladders, right? They reached out to some friends in business and are looking to productize their methods. The result: virtual workplaces.”

We all imagine that it was right then and there that Charles figured out what was going on. The rest of us, we were dealing with our own WTF ah-ha moment. To stay with Charles though, it was then that Geri, from account management, stuck her head in the conference room door.

“Charles, Travis–you have to see this.”

“We’re busy Geri.”

“Youre the floor fire warden. We need you right away.”

“Is there a fire?”

“No. Not really. But you’re the crisis go-to warden guy and this is that big. It is fire big.”

“All right. Come on Travis.”

Travis waved Geri and Charles off. “And, because it is a hyper-complex simulation, this simulated worker talks to his simulated coworkers and his simulated wife and his simulated mistress and whatever provides inspiration for a solid market analysis,” Travis said.

***

Thinking back, most of us are in agreement that Charles, at this point in the story, had it all figured out. That didn’t mean he was ready for what had happened to Meg.

Meg was a college intern from Lehigh–paid but barely. Nice kid, funny, cute as a button. The thing about her though was that suddenly there were two of her. Her/they hadn’t taken it well. When we found her/them she/they were wailing. We’ve seen crying in the office before. There was the time Davis got fired and he cried to Avi. There was the time Sandra’s husband called to tell her that he was never coming home again. Whenever somebody cries in an office, they are simultaneously losing it while trying to hold it all together.

The emotional explosion of tears meets with the brainwashing of office etiquette and you get this half-dismissive, half-collapse that is uniquely the office cry. The Both-Meg’s crying wasn’t that. This was a wail; a rent clothing, third-world mother ululating über-mourning on television style lamentation.

And we all did nothing. We just gathered around her/their cube, forming a semi-circle. Just watching her/their breakdown.

Michael Bagnulo lives in Brooklyn with his wife. He has never been featured on the Forbes 400, but that’s not for lack of trying.